The Official Essex Sisters Companion Guide (36 page)

“Are those your undergarments?” he asked. Her legs seemed to be clothed in white.

“Yes,” Imogen said casually. “French pantaloons. Quite useful for riding, if only Papa had been able to afford such a thing back when we used to ride without saddles.”

He grunted and moved off toward the road. The last thing he needed to do was stare at his ward’s legs. He had enough problems.

At first they both minced their way down the road. The moon slipped in and out of clouds, and when it was hidden the road would suddenly disappear. Rafe guessed she
must be frightened. Once he thought he heard a gasp. But he kept his horse ahead of hers, relishing the idea of Imogen with wide-open, terrified eyes. It would do her good.

There was a ripping noise behind him.

“Imogen!” he said sharply, swinging about. He didn’t want her so terrified that she fell from her horse.

At that moment the moon sprang from behind a cloud, covering the road and the trees with a silvery trembling light. Imogen held up a stretch of black cloth. She was laughing, with not a sign of terror on her face. Then she let it go.

“It was in my way. Isn’t this brilliant? I love riding at night!”

He watched her skirt fly into a ditch. Now all she wore was the low-necked top of her gown and those white pantaloons.

“Isn’t that uncomfortable?” he asked.

“Nope.” She grinned at him. “Want to have a race?”

“A race? In the
dark
?”

“Yes!”

“No! You’re risking your horse’s fetlocks. There might be a hole in the road and he’d have no time to adjust.”

She pouted. Her hair was falling down all over her shoulders. He looked back at the road. It shimmered in front of them, looking as straight and clean as an English toll road.

“The clouds have blown away for the moment,” she pointed out.

He hesitated. “You’re not drunk,” she said acidly. “I’m sure you’ll have much steadier hands with your mount than you are used to.”

“Fine!” he snapped, backing his horse next to hers. He glanced at her and frowned. “Why are you riding like that?”

She was poised above her saddle, bottom tilted slightly in the air, legs gripping her horse.

“It’s more comfortable,” she said cheerfully. “I’m afraid I don’t have a great deal of padding where it most counts.” She looked down fleetingly.

He felt a surge of lust, such as he hadn’t felt in years. He swallowed. It must be an effect of giving up the liquor.

Actually, he couldn’t remember the last time he felt desire for a woman. One advantage, to put against all the disadvantages of not drinking. Even if he did have to recover his desire in the presence of his least desirable ward.

“Your choice,” he said, shrugging.

“The jockeys ride this way,” she said, clearly unconcerned by the fact he was seeing every curve of her bottom, clad only in the lightest cotton. A lady she wasn’t. “That means I shall win.”

“No, you won’t,” he growled. “We’ll go to that bend. On my mark.”

He won. But only by a hairsbreadth, and only in a terrific gallop at the end of the road, and a wild scream of laughter from her.

“Oh, that was marvelous!” she cried when it was over. “Joe, you’re a beauty, a true beauty! We would have had you if you weren’t riding such a monster of a horse,” she said to Rafe.

Rafe grinned back. But he noticed how she winced as she sat back on her horse. “Perhaps we should walk them now,” he suggested. “After all, it’s the middle of the night and they must be tired.”

“All right,” she agreed, too quickly. So he jumped off his horse and then came to the side of hers and held up his hands.

He hadn’t done such a thing in years, and so he bungled it; somehow his hands caught on her bottom rather than her waist. And where she should have been covered by layers and layers of cloth, of course there was only fragile French cotton, tied with little blue bows, he noticed now. His hands were sliding down a curve that had him harder than—

Harder than he’d been in six years.

Perhaps there was something to giving up the tipple. He could take a mistress . . . a lush, welcoming woman who would greet him with a smile and a hot look of desire. Who would never scold.

He saw something in Imogen’s eyes when he put her on the ground. She had felt his hands too. And it had quieted her, at least. So that was good. She didn’t rail at him on the way home. That would teach her not to rip off her skirt and throw it in a ditch when there was no one around but a man. She was lucky he was a gentleman and her guardian.

They walked their horses back down the moonlit road. Imogen’s hair spilled around her shoulders, making her look witchlike.

He felt completely alive, his hair blowing from his brow, his legs warm from the exercise, his horse snuffling cheerfully in his ear. They walked farther, and it occurred to Rafe that he couldn’t remember having such a vivid experience in years.

Six years.

Oh, he remembered the headaches in the morning. And the golden, burning pleasure of his first drink in the evening. And the lullaby sweetness of finishing a glass and feeling calm steal over him.

But now he felt alive, raging with desire, if unfortunately directed in absolutely the wrong place. But still, it was back. His head didn’t hurt. He felt alive, every inch of him, alive.

He knew without thinking that he wouldn’t drink again.

Ever.

Ewan pulled himself together enough to say goodbye to Rafe, a different-looking Rafe actually: stronger around the jaw and steadier of eye. Mayne and Imogen were already in the carriage by the time he came downstairs.

“You’ve botched it all up royally,” Rafe said, by way of farewell.

Ewan nodded. He didn’t feel much like talking, these days.

“Your mare foaled two days ago,” Rafe told him. “Beautiful little filly, doing well. They tell me that you haven’t been there to see her yet.”

“I will certainly go at the first opportunity,” Ewan said politely. He only wanted for this foolish English duke to leave, get in his carriage and leave him to the blessed, empty silence of his study.

“When my brother died, I took up drinking,” Rafe said to him.

Ewan searched his empty mind for the appropriate response. Nothing appeared. “An unfortunate choice,” he said finally.

“You won’t be able to do that because Imogen destroyed all your whiskey. I’m sorry about that.”

Ewan shrugged.

“You look like hell,” Rafe said, hesitating as if he actually were thinking of staying rather than going.

Ewan reacted immediately. He summoned up a smile and put out his hand. “It’s been a pleasure having you at Ardmore Castle,” he said briskly. “Now you should probably get on the road so that you can make Inverurie before dusk. Do have a good journey.”

When the carriage finally trundled off down the road, Ewan stood for a moment in its dust, his hands in his pockets. He had a plan for the day. He was going to purge Annabel from his life and from his heart, the way Imogen purged the castle of liquor.

For the first time, he went to the room they had shared. Anything she had left he planned to throw out, throw away. When there was nothing in the castle to remind him that she was ever there, it would be easier to forget her. All those lacy camisoles she had, all those French bits of silk that she loved so much.

She would be nothing more than a memory, among all the other memories he had of people he’d lost. His mother, his little brother and sister. Rosy. Even Gregory was gone.

But she had left nothing. He ripped open the wardrobe and found empty shelves. He went into the bathroom, and there was nothing there but the lemony soft soap that he had brought back from London himself. There was no book on the table, no scrap of writing, no ribbon.

It was all gone. Finally, on the floor next to her dressing table, he found one hairpin. He sank onto her chair, holding the pin.

It was hard to purge someone from your life when she had already purged herself. For a moment a surge of agony swept his heart. It was like an open wound, all that longing for her—not desire, not lust, just longing to see her, to cup her face, to kiss her, to have her smile at him, laugh, kiss him again—

But she would never kiss him again. Not him, the man who hadn’t saved her. The man who had accused her of killing Rosy. Not him . . . a blackened cinder on the earth’s surface.

Something in him recoiled at his own self-pity, so he got unsteadily to his feet and flicked the hairpin into the close-stool.

He had done all the work that had built up during his stay in London. His desk was empty, and unless he manufactured business by selling one of his holdings just to create needless work, he was done. Finished.

Of course, he should go to the stables and see that new filly.

He walked downstairs. Father Armailhac was sitting in the hallway, hands clasped in his lap. Ewan almost groaned. The last thing he wanted was to see this silly old man with all his talk of God’s gifts. Armailhac didn’t seem to understand that Ewan was no longer one of the people who would ever talk of God. He was in no mood to jolly the priest along by listening to his prattle. Perhaps it was time that the monks left. He could give them land to found their own monastery.

But Armailhac didn’t try to stop him. “I just want to tell you one thing,” he said.

Ewan waited impatiently for some soporific trifle.

Sure enough: “There is no sin that is unforgivable. God forgives all. And He loves you.”

Ewan couldn’t resist one retort. “For killing Rosy?”

“That is a lesser sin to the one you are committing now,” Father Armailhac said calmly. “Rosy’s time had come and you, Ewan, were unfortunately the instrument of that time. But she died at peace, and with God. Shutting out your wife, with selfishness and self-hatred . . . ’tis the greater sin.”

Ewan didn’t even answer him. The man was crazed, cracked. It was no wonder that Napoleon dissolved his monastery. He strode by the monk, out the door, and then stopped. Where to go?

Father Armailhac appeared at his back. “They’re pulling flax in the north field,” he said cheerfully, quite as if Ewan hadn’t snubbed him. “They can always use an extra hand.”

More to get away from him than anything, Ewan grunted and strode off toward the north field. He’d never engaged in physical labor. After all, he was the earl, master of eleven lairds, owner of a handsome chunk of his own country . . .

Two hours later he was stripped to the waist, pulling small sheaves of flax in motion with the rest. At first the men hadn’t known what to make of the earl being amongst them. But when he just kept working, silent, possessed, they began ignoring him.

By the time the field was done, they were throwing back and forth comments to each other as if he weren’t there, as if he were an itinerant laborer hired for the season who couldn’t speak with a country Scots burr. Worse, a Sassenach who could speak only English.

He came back to the house aching in every limb, a dull ache that sharpened to agony when he bent over or tried to raise his arms. And when he automatically walked into the bedchamber he and Annabel had shared, he didn’t turn and go upstairs. There was nothing of her here. It was, again, his bedchamber and no more.

He had no sense of her while he took a bath. No images of her intruded. That night he fell into bed and slept through the night. And he had no dreams.

The next morning was the field, another field. He grunted with every pull this time because his arms screamed in agony. But it didn’t matter. He finally worked his way to the edge of the field, where he wouldn’t hamper his laborers, who were far faster and more thorough than he was.

On the fifth day, when he got to the end of a line of flax, Mac was there, holding a small pile of paper. He wiped the sweat from his brow and took a tin beaker of ale. Then he signed the pages Mac held out without looking.

That became something of a routine as the long summer wound into fall. The hedgerows were turning crimson alongside the roads that Ewan walked to reach the fields. He had harvested, plowed, planted and weeded.

He worked longer hours than his men, and only now was he beginning to appreciate the amount of work they got done.

One morning he left the house just at sunup and surprised himself by noticing how beautiful the lane was, the hedges all pillowed with thistledown blown into little heaps. A rusty sound echoed in the early morning air, and a flock of geese flew over. Winter was coming. Already he could feel a snap in the air in the morning, a little chill reminder of what lay ahead.

And for the first time, he thought of Annabel without pushing the thought away. It was just as well that she’d left him, for Scottish winters were long and cold. She was better off in London, where it likely sparkled with lights no matter what the weather.

Or perhaps she would spend Christmas with Rafe in some rambling pile of an English country house. Either way, it was better than a Scottish castle that grew cold in the winter, even with Rumford stoves to heat it.

They were harvesting wheat today, the second sowing. The first sowing had gone into Ewan’s own stables, for his horses and cattle. The second was for his laborers and their animals. They were in high spirits, calling to each other not to miss that row or that tuft of wheat.

As always, he worked silently. He was aware by now that they had decided he was daft. His wife left him, they thought, for that reason. They knew something of what had happened with Rosy.

At noon he found Mac waiting for him with a tankard of water and a pile of papers. Mac rapidly explained each page, until they reached the last one, and then he fell silent.

Ewan looked up at him questioning, and then took the sheet. It was a draft against Ewan’s English bank, a draft for a substantial sum . . . enough to buy a house in the country and another in town, if she wished. Mac had written, simply:
Maintenance for the support of Annabel Poley, Countess of Ardmore
.

Ewan swallowed and scrawled his signature across the paper. Then without a word he took his scythe and returned to the field.

He swung the scythe to the tune of the same thought, over and over.
She was better off without him
. He didn’t protect her from those murdering bastards.

She was better off without him
. He was a man damned, a man without belief in God, a man—

He dropped the scythe. The world hadn’t stopped being beautiful merely because he was no longer thinking it was a gift from God. The gift was still there, whether he welcomed it or no.

As he stood, a delicate thistledown floated into his hand, a structure of heartbreakingly fragile little threads supporting a tuft of cotton softer than all that silk Annabel loved so much.

It flew with hope, on the wind, trusting that it would come home to the green, dark earth.

And then suddenly, one sentence of Father Armailhac’s slipped into his mind like a benediction. “There is, after all,” Father Armailhac had said severely to Uncle Pearce, when Uncle Pearce had blatantly cheated and won a game, “so much that we have to take on trust. We trust that every road leads to some destination, and that an unspoken promise is still a promise.”

The thistledown trembled in his open palm, like a promise of beauty, a gift. Acknowledged or not, believed in or not, the gift was still there.